


tipping point

by emmram



Category: Titans (TV 2018)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-16
Updated: 2019-02-16
Packaged: 2019-10-29 12:46:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17808212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emmram/pseuds/emmram
Summary: dick grayson breaks batman’s neck, and the world doesn’t stop.1.11 SPOILERS.





	tipping point

**Author's Note:**

> warnings: spoilers for titans 1.11. character death, violence. 
> 
> uhhh... idek?

 

**1.**

dick grayson breaks batman’s neck, and the world doesn’t stop.

**9.**

for a little while, gar tries to hide him from everybody else.

dick can’t understand any of it–whether it’s gar’s motivation to do this, or the fact that he’s managed to keep it a secret from everybody else. from donna. from  _rachel_. 

“i  _get_  it, you know?” gar tells him earnestly. “better than anybody else ever can. whatever happened back in gotham? not you. or, at least, it was you in, like, extraordinarily shitty circumstances, and we can just… make sure those circumstances don’t happen again.”

there’s dried blood and pieces of sinew stuck between gar’s teeth. dick blinks, and they’re gone. “and you’re going to do that,” he says slowly, “by tying me up in this basement forever?”

“only until the dust blows over–”

“is this what you wish we’d done to you?”

gar’s mouth snaps shut. his eyes glint amber, and dick tenses, ready.

**5.**

gotham looks like the sun will never rise on it again.

the streets are clogged with screaming people; entire buildings are covered in sheets of ice, staccato bursts of machine-gun fire punctuate the screaming, and above it all, ringing in dick’s ears: the cackling laughter of hundreds of joker’s acolytes. the ground squelches beneath his boots and he can’t tell if it’s water or sewage or blood. 

dick should–

 _robin_  should–

– _do something–_

 _you’ve done **everything** , _a whisper curls in his ear,  _you’ve destroyed something none of them could even touch for decades._

“besides,” dick tells himself, “there’s nothing left to save.”

 _not even you_.

it’s the lightest dick has felt in a lifetime.

**12.**

dick hangs in the league’s makeshift prison and hums tunelessly to himself. his arms have long lost feeling, so he swings his legs and sways. if he closes his eyes, it’s almost like he’s… thirteen years old and strung up by two-face to be tortured. or sixteen and the joker’s about to flay him alive. or eighteen and–

“why are you laughing?” donna asks.

dick snaps open his eyes. “childhood nostalgia,” he says. “no matter how far you run, things just come full circle, huh?”

“you’re here because we’re worried about you,” she says. “we can help you, you know that, dick.”

dick is too busy staring at the tense line of her jaw and the way her shoulders are hunched, like she’s bracing herself against an imminent blow. “it’s okay if you guys don’t know how to deal with me,” he tells her casually. “you can lock me in a box and have supes drop-kick me into space–it’s functioned as an ethical work-around for bruce before, you know.”

donna clenches her teeth. “ _dick_ ,” she says. “we want to  _help you_.”

dick sighs and goes back to humming.

**3.**

kory doesn’t fit in his arms, and dick almost drops her twice in his stumbling attempts to bring her body out of the smouldering wreckage of wayne manor.

it’s not fair. he’s seen batman cradle so many corpses in his arms, just like this, and dick can’t even do this  _once_?

not even for–

he pins kory to his chest and lets a tidal wave of grief wash over him. when he surfaces, dick is cold and kory is colder, but his mind is clearer than it’s ever been. he gets up, and stumbles, and stumbles, but doesn’t stop.

**8.**

gotham is too busy descending into hell, so the justice league holds a small, private funeral for bruce wayne instead.

dick’s heart is pounding so hard that he’s sure clark is going to find him any minute. he isn’t sure why he came in the first place–isn’t it how this whole clusterfuck started, because he was egotistical enough to believe he was special to batman? like he hadn’t systematically snapped whatever links that connected him to bruce and then razed them to the ground? 

like he hadn’t  _snapped his_ –

“dick, you asshole,” he hears. he turns to see a flash of teeth and green skin before he’s whisked away.

**14.**

he’s in a cocoon, free of time, feeling, pain and hunger. it feels like death, if death is blank nothingness, a mind scraped raw until it is utterly numb.

he floats.

**10.**

dick watches the claw marks on his neck stitch themselves back together in the mirror. his eyes are entirely inky black now, and the black creeps into the skin beneath his eyes, like they’re leaking. like he’s  _crying_.

he snorts to himself and peels his bloody shirt off.

something in the basement  _howls_.

**6.**

jason pops up just as abruptly as he’d left. dick swats him aside without another thought.

**2.**

dick drops to his knees, and with numb, shaking hands, wrestles batman’s cowl off his mangled body. bruce’s eyes are closed, like he’d resigned himself to his death long before dick raised his boot to crush his neck. he’d reached out to dick but refused to see him, right up to the end.

dick wonders if this is what bruce wanted from the beginning.

**11.**

it’s only when rachel arrives with the justice league to capture him does dick feel something other than all-encompassing numbness. it isn’t betrayal, but it isn’t happiness, either. it swells and festers in his chest. 

he wants to fall to his knees and hold rachel to his chest like he never wants to let her go, but diana is holding his arms behind him in an iron grip. rachel’s eyes are wide and wet and so, so scared.

“i promise i’m never going to leave you,” he says.

diana jerks on his hands until his shoulders grind in their sockets.

**4.**

his phone keeps buzzing as dawn tries to reach him over and over again. he gently lays kory by one of the ambulances that’s pulled up on the grounds of wayne manor, then finally answers his phone.

“dick,” dawn cries. “dick–john–the fever–oh god,  _dick_ –he’s, he’s, gon–”

dick cuts the call, turns the phone off and places it by kory’s corpse. then he begins to walk toward gotham’s.

**13.**

dick doesn’t know what solution the league comes up with to get rid of him, but there’s an instant of blinding white light and pain that feels like his skin is getting flayed off him all at once, and then–a sudden disorienting numbness. he can’t feel the bonds around his arms anymore, or the numerous bruises and scrapes across his body. he can’t feel his heart beating or breath moving in and out of his lungs– _dick grayson_ exists, but abstractly, as a belief.

a myth.

**7.**

gotham only quietens when dick grayson finished what batman started. 

**15.**

somewhere, sometime in this cocoon of nothingness, dick feels warmth, a point of light beckoning him. a hand reaches out of nowhere and dick reaches in kind. the hand is soft, and warm, and pulls him, gasping, into a world full of light and sound and evil and  _love–_

the hand belongs to a woman, and she looks at him like he is her entire universe. “beloved,” she says.

“angela,” he says. “we haven’t much time.”

“give me the key, then,” she says, “to bring you here, by my side, forever. tell me what i must do.”

he tells her.

the world doesn’t stop.


End file.
